Most surgical procedures require some form of intervention to alleviate pain and/or discomfort and/or stress for the patient. Dental procedures such as dental operations are recognized as potentially highly stressful for the patient and this can be exacerbated when the patient is a younger person or child. In some situations, the stress induced by the procedure is sufficient to impair the ability of the dentist or dental surgeon to perform the procedure and may be sufficiently traumatic for the patient that further procedures will not be contemplated.
To overcome the difficulties in performing the dental procedure, it is sometimes necessary to resort to the use of anesthetics for dental procedures, such as removing the wisdom teeth, or for patients who are highly stressed or to treat younger children.
Deep sedation is now frequently performed in hospitals for out of operating procedures that are painful or require lack of movement. Deep sedation is also used in out of hospital settings which would include pediatric dental offices. Anesthetic machine (delivering anesthetic gases) is not needed for deep sedation anesthesia. However the monitoring would be similar for both—the difference being the lack of need to monitor inhaled and exhaled anesthetic gases for those patients receiving deep sedation. There is however a reticence to the use of deep sedation with dental procedures because of historical issues regarding substandard monitoring, inadequate training and distraction resulting from the dentist taking responsibility for the procedure and the anesthesia.
The monitoring of the patient condition includes the maintenance of the level of oxygen in the blood and the continuous monitoring of the patients breathing. Monitoring of the patients breathing, includes monitoring the carbon dioxide exhaled by the patient. Nasal prongs are typically used for such monitoring, but with dental procedures they may be unreliable due to the fact that breathing may take place through the open mouth, the nasal passages or both. These concerns are exaggerated in children who have proportionally smaller nasal passages that may be partially occluded by adenoids or secretions.
A further difficulty associated with the supply of oxygen and monitoring of the patient arises from the need to perform the procedure within the mouth so that there is a risk that the oxygen supply and carbon dioxide monitoring apparatus will impinge upon the area in which the dental surgeon may wish to work.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus and method in which the above disadvantages are obviated or mitigated.